If you’ve ever landed at an airport, frantically looking for your boarding pass, hotel confirmation, and car rental details in three different apps, Samsung has something for you.
The company has launched a new Samsung Wallet feature called Trips, which is designed to pull every piece of a travel itinerary into an organized timeline, right inside the familiar app interface Galaxy owners use every day.
What does the Trips feature actually do?
The Trips feature works by grouping together eligible travel details and items saved in Samsung Wallet, including flights, accommodations, car rentals, bus/train tickets, theme park passes, or even sporting event tickets.
In addition, users can manually add itinerary items and attach memos alongside the already-saved bookings as reminders or notes throughout their journey. This could be useful for anything from restaurant reservations to local tips, which don’t come with formal confirmation but still add up to your total expenditure.
To instill confidence among users, Samsung is leaning hard on Knox, which is its own security platform. Knox uses encryption and biometric authentication to ensure only the actual owner of the device can access the Trips data stored in Wallet.
Is it secure enough to trust with your travel details?
This, in my opinion, is one of the key characteristics of the feature, especially since people will use it to store and view their boarding passes, hotel keys, and payment information, most of which contain some sort of sensitive information.
As the feature arrives for Samsung Wallet users in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Korea, they’d no longer have to juggle between four different applications at the same time, which, speaking with personal experience, is quite frustrating when you’re traveling on a strict schedule.
The Wallet’s new Trip feature looks like a strategic move by Samsung to lock in its customers in its own ecosystem, preventing them from using third-party applications. Apple Wallet has long offered boarding passes and hotel keys, but a dedicated trip timeline with memo support and grouping cross-category travel items goes multiple steps further.
